At many situations, users may want to know the relationship between their storage devices and hosts on certain I/O operations. For example, if a user gets a Reservation Conflict error message when the user is attempting to access a storage device, then the user may want to know which host is currently holding the reservation in order to resolve. Also by example, if the user gets a Medium Removal Prevented error message when the user is attempting to unload a tape cartridge from a tape drive, then the user may want to know which host or hosts have issued a Prevent Medium Removal command on the tape drive. These exemplary situations have been seen many times in storage environments. The known solution of solving these situations is for the user to reset the storage device.
Furthermore, each storage device can be represented with a device special file name (“DSFN”) on host, such as, for example, /dev/rmt0, /dev/rmt1, etc. for tape drives on AIX. At many situations, a user may want to know a correlation between their storage devices and the device special file names configured on a host from a display on the storage device side. For example, a user may want to know whether a tape library's first drive is configured as rmt0 or rmt1 on host A from the library's front panel or Web GUI display. Currently there is no known solution for this feature.
In summary, there is a need for a method to dynamically communicate the runtime host names and device special file names established by hosts to storage devices in a storage environment.